LOFTY AMBITIONS

Architect and co-founder of RT+Q Rene Tan and bank director Chuah Woei Woei's home combines fun and functionality with quirk and a dose of madness.

- Tracy Lee.

You'd expect an architect's own home to be anything but ordinary, and indeed, Rene Tan's 4,811sqft semi-detached house in Bukit Timah is so extraordinary that it won the Design Award for the Residential - Low-Density Housing category at the prestigious SIA Design Awards in 2020.

"I'm 57 and this might be the last chance I have to spoil my wife," says Tan, who describes the three guiding principles of his work as "don't think like an architect", "use your counter intuition" and "don't be afraid to put the right thing in the wrong place". It's an approach that has paid off handsomely at RT+Q, the architectural firm he Co-founded with TK Quek in 2003, which has designed 140 houses so far (and counting), several of which have scooped up design awards.

Of course, it's natural that Tan's own home should incorporate these very guiding principles, as well as some far-out ideas that clients had requested him to leave on the drawing board. It has been dubbed the "House of Spice" by his wife Chuah Woei Woei (who works as a director in a bank) and teenage daughter Lara, but the Tan quips that it "should actually have been called the 'House of Rejects".

"Most people don't like exposed columns; they find fair-faced concrete crude and unfinished; they think sliding walls are weird and that it's wasteful to make the wet kitchen the largest space of an already modest house," he observes, "so these are the elements I included."